Selective epitaxial growth technology has been extended to the base formation of a transistor on the basis of the SATURN (Self-Alignment Technology Utilizing Reserved Nitride) process, a high-speed bipolar LSI processing technology. The formation of a self-aligned base contact, coupled with SIC (Selective Ion-implanted Collector) fabricated by lowenergy ion implantation, has not only narrowed the transistor active regions but has drastically reduced the base width. A final base width of 800 and a maximum cut-off frequency of 31 GHz were achieved.

This letter presents a novel application of the Verilog-A, which is a hardware description language for analog circuits, to the modeling and simulation of high-speed interconnects in time/frequency transform-domain for signal integrity problems. This modeling method with the Verilog-A language would handle the transfer function approximation and admittance matrices, which are expressed by the dominant poles and residues as used in AWE technique. Finally, it is shown that modeling and simulation of the high-speed interconnects with nonlinear terminations can be done easily.

We have developed the Epi-Base SATURN process as a silicon bipolar process technology which can be applied to optical transmission LSIs. This process technology, to which low temperature selective epitaxial growth technology is applied, is based on the SATURN process. By performing selective epitaxial growth for base formation in 2 steps, transistors with a 40GHz maximum cut-off frequency have been fabricated. In circuit simulation based on SPICE parameters of transistors, the target performance required for 2.4 Gbit/s optical interface LSIs has been achieved.